What FM27 Needs to do to get Everyone Back Onside

I have been looking through the reaction to Jack’s post on X and the big Reddit thread asking what FM27 needs to do to restore people’s faith in the series, and the overall mood is pretty obvious. Football Manager players are asking for Sports Interactive to remember what made the game worth obsessing over in the first place. There is a difference between moving a series forward and dragging it away from its strengths and right now a lot of the community clearly feels like Football Manager has done the second one. That is why the reaction is a kind of tired disappointment. People are annoyed that FM26 missed the mark and they are annoyed because the fixes feel so obvious from the outside.

 

The Main Issue

The biggest complaint, by miles, is the UI, and I do not think there is any point pretending otherwise. It completely dominates the discussion because the UI in Football Manager is not some secondary part of the experience. It basically is the experience. This is a game built around information, navigation, comparison, scouting, browsing, jumping between players, leagues, competitions and data screens, and doing all of that quickly enough that it becomes second nature. That was part of the pleasure of older FMs. You could play half-asleep and still know exactly where everything was. You could lose 40 minutes just drifting around the game world because it was enjoyable to click through it. In FM26, from the way players talk about it, that instinctive flow has been replaced by friction. Too many clicks, too many pop-ups, too much wasted space, too much hovering around trying to reach basic information that used to be easy to find. It does not just make the game uglier. It makes it more tiring to play.

That matters far more than Sports Interactive probably expected, because a football management sim lives and dies on how pleasant it is to use. People will forgive all sorts of weirdness in Football Manager if the game still feels good in the hand. They will live with some annoying player interactions, a few odd transfer quirks, or another recycled press conference question if the broader experience still has rhythm to it. Once that rhythm disappears, all the old flaws suddenly feel ten times bigger. That is exactly where FM seems to have landed. Players who used to shrug off longstanding issues are now listing them all out again because the game no longer gives them enough in return. A bad interface has a way of exposing every weakness underneath it. If the menus are clunky and the game world is harder to explore, you stop feeling immersed and start noticing all the duct tape.

 

So What Should FM27 Look Like?

What keeps coming up over and over again is that very few people actually wanted the series ripped up in the first place. The popular version of FM27, judging by the reaction across both posts, is basically FM24 with a handful of FM26’s better ideas bolted onto it. That sounds unambitious on paper, but it tells you a lot about how badly SI seem to have misread the room. Most players were not desperate for Football Manager to become something sleeker, simpler, more panelled-off and more console-friendly. They wanted the matchday presentation to improve, they wanted the tactical side to evolve, they wanted old broken systems finally sorted out, and they wanted the game to keep building on the dense, slightly nerdy PC identity that made it so addictive in the first place. Instead, the overwhelming perception is that SI spent years remodelling the bits that did not need radical change while leaving the older, deeper issues either untouched or not improved enough to matter.

That is why the FM24 comparison keeps coming back. It is not just nostalgia for the sake of it. FM24 has become the reference point because it still felt like Football Manager in a way FM26 evidently does not for a lot of players. That does not mean FM24 was perfect, because it absolutely was not. Its player interactions could still be ridiculous, the reputation system still had problems, some of the match engine quirks were still there, and there were plenty of familiar frustrations hanging around. But the difference is that FM24 was easy to live in. It still had that lovely feeling of being able to jump around the world, check a competition, click into a squad, compare attributes, dive into historical stats, scout a random wonderkid and emerge 20 minutes later having forgotten what you originally meant to do. That kind of browsing is not a side attraction in Football Manager. It is one of the main reasons people rack up absurd hour counts. Once the game makes that feel like admin, it loses a big chunk of its appeal.

A lot of the current reaction also comes down to immersion, and that word can sound a bit vague until you think about what people actually mean by it in FM. They are not asking for more cinematic nonsense, or some overproduced layer of presentation pretending to be realism. They want the football world to feel alive. They want saves to have memory, personality and context. They want to feel the passage of time. They want retired players to matter, old title races to be easy to revisit, international tournaments to feel like events, the game world to throw up stories and details without making you dig through five menus just to find out who is top scorer in a league. Football Manager has always worked best when it creates that private universe around you, where a youth player you promoted years ago still means something and a random cup upset in another country catches your eye because the game knows how to surface that information naturally. A lot of players seem to think FM26 has stripped that back. The world feels flatter, less memorable, less worth poking around in. That is a serious problem for a series built on obsession.

Once you get beyond the interface complaints, the rest of the wishlist is not especially mysterious either. People want the old problem areas fixed properly, not endlessly carried over. Reputation is still one of the biggest ones because it warps so much of the experience. Transfer logic is still prone to nonsense. Player interactions are still too often somewhere between robotic and absurd. Wage demands and squad reactions can still veer off into parody. Long-term saves still have too many weak spots, whether that is history retention, youth development, regen quality, or the way the game world can start to feel a bit broken after enough seasons. None of this is new, which is exactly why patience is running out. FM26 has had the unfortunate effect of making people look back over the whole series and realise how many issues they had been putting up with simply because the core game still had enough magic to outweigh them.

 

Additional Features

International management is another one that keeps coming up and I do not think that is just because a niche group misses having another mode to tinker with. Its absence makes the football world feel smaller. Even players who do not spend most of their saves managing national teams still like the fact that international football exists properly within the world. It adds texture. It gives tournaments their own sense of occasion. It broadens the save and makes the sport feel bigger than your club career. When that starts disappearing, Football Manager loses part of its scale. In a World Cup year especially, it is a glaring omission, and it feeds into the wider sense that the series has become narrower just when it needed to feel richer.

Then there is the modding side of it, which matters more than SI probably likes to admit. Football Manager has always had a community that picks up the slack, whether that is with skins, facepacks, database tweaks, quality-of-life fixes or bigger overhauls. That is part of the series’ ecosystem, not some optional extra for a few power users. If the default experience gets worse and the game becomes harder to customise, people are going to feel boxed in very quickly. A lot of players clearly think that if SI cannot please everyone with its own design choices, the least it can do is make life easier for the people who keep the game alive between official updates. That means proper skinning support, less breakage, more openness and less sense that customisation is being tolerated rather than embraced.

 

Is there anything to keep from FM26?

I do think there is a small section of the fanbase that can see something worthwhile in FM26, particularly in the tactical side of the game. The in-possession and out-of-possession split is one of the few genuinely positive things that gets mentioned with any regularity, and there are players who seem to believe the foundations for a better game are in there somewhere. But that is clearly a minority position at the moment. The dominant view is not that SI took a bold step and stumbled slightly. It is that they tried to modernise the wrong parts, chased an audience that does not really line up with what Football Manager has always been, and weakened the exact things their existing audience cared about most. That is a much more damaging perception than a rough launch, because it turns a bad release into a crisis of trust.

And trust is really what FM27 has to win back. That is the bigger issue sitting underneath all the complaints about tiles, cards, pop-ups and missing features. People no longer automatically believe Sports Interactive knows what Football Manager players value. They do not automatically believe the next game will fix the obvious problems. They do not automatically believe a new feature reveal means genuine progress rather than another detour. That is a difficult place for any long-running series to end up, especially one that lived for so long off goodwill, habit and the assumption that even when things were imperfect, the people making it still understood the audience.

So when people ask what FM27 needs to do to make everyone think Football Manager is back, my answer is pretty simple. It needs to feel like a Football Manager made by people who actually appreciate why players fell in love with it. That means restoring usability, restoring depth, restoring the instinctive joy of clicking around the game world, restoring some of the detail and history that made saves feel personal, and finally dealing with the stale systems that have been dragging on for years. It means building for the people who like Football Manager because it is dense, nerdy, slightly overwhelming and endlessly replayable, not because it has neat panels and a cleaner path to the continue button. If SI can do that, then people will forgive a lot. If it cannot, no trailer in the world is going to convince them the series is back.

 

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